Journey by Moonlight (6 page)

“Ervin certainly did not become a monk just because he couldn’t marry Éva. We had in the past talked a great deal about the
monastic
life, and I know that Ervin’s religion went too deep—he would never have become a monk merely out of despair and romantic sensibility, without any definite sign of an inner calling. Certainly he saw it as a sign from above that he couldn’t marry Éva. But the fact that he left so hastily, virtually fled, could have been largely to do with the fact that he wanted to escape from Éva and the temptation she represented for him. So although he ran away, perhaps a bit like Joseph, he nonetheless accomplished what we had dreamed about so much at that time. He offered up his youth as a willing sacrifice to God.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Erzsi. “If, as you say, he was so
loving
by nature, why offer that up as a sacrifice?”

“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It’s not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That’s why the Church won’t allow eunuchs to become priests.”

“And what did Éva have to say to all this?”

“Éva remained unattached, and from this point on she was impossible to put up with. By this time Budapest was in the hands of the currency sharks and the officers of the Entente. Éva
somehow
or other got herself into the officers’ set. She knew various languages and her manner was somehow not typically Hungarian but more cosmopolitan. I know she was very much in demand.
She went, from one day to the next, from a little adolescent girl to a stunning woman. This was when, in place of the earlier friendly and open expression, her eye took on that other quality: that look, as if she were listening to some far off, murmuring sound.

“Earlier on, Tamás and Ervin had dominated the group. Now it was János’s turn. Éva needed money so that she could make her exquisite appearance among the exquisite people. She was very clever at sewing herself elegant things out of nothing, but even that nothing costs a little something. That was where János came in. He’d always been able to get hold of money for Éva. Where from, he alone knew. Often he swindled the very same Entente officers she danced with. ‘I’ve been realising the group assets,’ he would say cynically. But by then we all talked cynically, because we always adapted ourselves to the leadership style.

“I didn’t like János’s methods very much. They were pretty unscrupulous. I didn’t like it, for example, when he called one day on Mr Reich, an old book-keeper in my father’s firm and, with a horribly convoluted story about my gambling debts and proposed suicide, lifted a fairly serious sum of money from him. Of course I then had to agree that I had incurred a debt at cards, though I never had a card in my hand in all my life.

“And what I particularly didn’t like was his stealing my gold watch. It happened on the occasion of a grand ‘do’ out of doors
somewhere
, in a then fashionable summer inn, I no longer remember the name. There were several of us present—Éva’s friends, two or three foreign officers, some young inflation-millionaires, some strange women, remarkably daring for those times in their dress and
general
behaviour. My usual sense of impermanence was made worse by the fact that Tamás and I were mixing with people not our own, people we had nothing in common with, and by the same old feeling that nothing mattered. But then I wasn’t the only one with this sense of impermanence. The whole city had it, it was in the air. People had a lot of money and they knew that it made no
difference
: it might vanish from one day to the next. The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.

“They were apocalyptic times. I don’t know if we were still sober when we sat down to drink. As I recall, it’s as if I became drunk in the first few moments. Tamás drank little, but the universal feeling
that the world was going to end was so much in accord with his state of mind that he moved with unaccustomed ease among all those people, even the gypsies. I talked with him a lot that night. Not perhaps so much in words, but the words we did speak had a profoundly sinister resonance. And once again, marvellously, we understood each other—understood each other in our
impermanence
. And we shared this sympathy with the strange women: at least, I felt that my modest religious-historical thesis about the Celts and the Islands of the Dead found an echo in the drama student sitting near me. Then I got into a tête-à-tête with Éva. I courted her as if I hadn’t known her since her skinny, big-eyed adolescence and she received my courtship with a complete
womanly
seriousness, talking in half-finished sentences and staring into the distance, in the full glitter of her pose of that time.

“By the time it started to become light I felt really ill. Then, when I’d sobered up a bit, I realised my gold watch had
disappeared
. I was really shocked. My despair verged on hysteria. You have to understand: the mere loss of a gold watch is not in itself such a misfortune, not even when you are twenty and have
nothing
else of value in the world, nothing but your gold watch. But when you are twenty, and you sober up in the light of dawn to find your gold watch has actually been stolen, then you begin to see a symbolic importance in the loss. I had it from my father, who is not by nature a great giver of gifts. I tell you, it was my only object of value, the only one worth mentioning—admittedly a bulky,
commonplace
thing, whose pretentious, petty-bourgeois quality stood for everything I disliked. But its loss, now that it appeared to me in its full symbolic significance, filled me with panic. It was the
feeling
that I was now irrevocably damned: that they had stolen the very possibility that I might one day sober up and get back to the bourgeois world.

“I staggered over to Tamás, told him that my watch had been stolen, said that I would telephone the police and tell the
innkeeper
to lock the gate. They would have to search every guest. Tamás calmed me down in his own special way:

“‘It’s not worth it. Let it go. Of course it was stolen. They’ll steal everything you’ve got. You’ll always be the victim. It’s what you really want.’

“I stared at him in amazement. But in fact I never said a word to anyone about the disappearance of the watch. As I gazed at Tamás I suddenly understood that only János Szepetneki could have stolen it. In the course of the evening there had been a game of exchanging clothes. Szepetneki and I had swapped coats and ties. Probably when I got my coat back the watch had already gone. I started to look for János to confront him, but he’d already left. I didn’t see him the next day, or the day after that.

“And on the fourth day I still hadn’t been able to challenge him about it. I was sure that only he could have taken it, and that he had done so because Éva needed money. In all probability he had taken it with her full knowledge. She had set up the whole
clothes-swapping
game—and that was the point of the scene when I sat alone with her. Perhaps its whole purpose was so that I wouldn’t
immediately
notice that it had gone. When I stumbled on this possibility I was able to accept what had happened. If it happened because of Éva, it was all right. It was all part of the game, the old games in the Ulpius house.

“From that moment I was in love with Éva.”

“But then why have you so strenuously denied all along that you were ever in love with her?” Erzsi interjected.

“Of course. I was quite right to. It’s only for want of a better word that I call what I felt for her, love. That feeling wasn’t in the least like the feeling I have for you, and had, if you’ll
forgive
me, for one or two of your predecessors. In a way it was quite the reverse. I love you because you’re part of me. I loved Éva because she wasn’t. That’s to say, loving you gives me confidence and strength, but when I loved her, it humiliated and annihilated me … Of course these expressions are merely antithetical. When it happened, I felt that the truth of the old plays was supreme, and I was being slowly destroyed in the great climax. I was being destroyed because of Éva, through Éva, just as we had played it in our adolescence.”

Mihály got up and walked restlessly round the room. It had at last begun to worry him that he had so given himself away. To Erzsi, a stranger …

Erzsi remarked:

“Before that, you said something about … that you couldn’t
possibly be in love with her, because you knew each other too well, there wasn’t the necessary distance between you for you to fall in love.”

(“Good—she hasn’t understood,” he thought. “She’s taking in only as much as her basic jealousy can grasp.”)

“It’s good that you mention that,” he continued, calmly. “Until that memorable night there was no distance. Then I discovered, as the two of us sat there, like a lady with her gentleman, that she had become a totally different woman, a strange, splendid,
stunning
woman, whereas the old Éva would have carried within her, ineradicably, the old dark, sick sweetness of my youth.

“But generally Éva didn’t give a damn for me. I rarely managed to see her and when I did she showed no interest in me. Her
restlessness
was somehow pathological. Especially after the serious suitor appeared—a wealthy, famous, not-exactly-young collector of antiques, who had turned up once or twice at the Ulpius house with the old man, caught the odd glimpse of her, and had long busied himself with plans to make her his wife. The old Ulpius informed Éva he would hear not a word of protest: she had lived off him quite long enough. She would marry, or go to hell. Éva asked for two months’ delay. The old man consented, at the
fiancé’s
request.

“The more she neglected me, the stronger was my feeling of what I called, for want of a better word, love. It seems I had a real bent at that time for hopeless gestures: standing around by her gate at night to spy on her as she came home with her laughing and noisy crowd of admirers; neglecting my studies; spending all my money on stupid presents which she didn’t even acknowledge; being cravenly sentimental and creating unmanly scenes if I met her. That was my style. Then I was truly alive. No joy I ever
experienced
afterwards ever ran as deep as the pain, the exulting
humiliation
, of knowing I was lost for love of her and that she didn’t care for me. Is that what you call love?”

(“Why am I saying all this? Why? … Once again I’ve drunk too much. But I had to tell her at some stage, and she isn’t really
taking
it in … ”)

“Meanwhile the delay Éva had been granted was coming to its end. Old Ulpius would occasionally burst into her room and
make terrible scenes. In those days he was never sober. The fiancé himself appeared, with his greying hair and apologetic smile. Éva asked for one more week. So that she could go away with Tamás, in a calm atmosphere, so they could take their leave of one another. Somehow money was found for the journey.

“Off they went, to Hallstatt. It was late autumn. There wasn’t a soul there besides them. There’s nothing more funereal than an old historical watering place like that. A castle or cathedral might be ancient, past its time, crumbling away here and there. It’s natural, that’s its function. But when that sort of place, a coffee-house or a promenade, designed for the pleasures of the moment, when that shows its impermanence—there’s nothing more ghastly.”

“Yes, yes,” said Erzsi, “just get on with it. What happened to Tamás and Éva?”

“My dear, if I beat about the bush and philosophise, it’s because from that point on I don’t know what happened to them. I never saw them again. In Hallstatt Tamás Ulpius poisoned himself. This time he made no mistake.”

“And Éva?”

“You mean, what part did she have in Tamás’s death? Perhaps none. I’ve no way of knowing. She never returned. It was said that after he died some high-ranking foreign officer came and took her away.

“Perhaps I might have been able to meet her. Once or twice in the following years there might have been a chance. From time to time János would pitch up out of the blue, make obscure
reference
to the fact that he could possibly arrange for me to see her, and would be happy to do so I if I would reward his services. But by then I had no desire to meet Éva. That’s why János said earlier tonight that it was my fault, because I walked out on the friends of my youth, when all I had to do was hold out my hand … He was right. When Tamás died I believe I went out of my mind. And then I decided I would change, I would tear myself away from the spell. I didn’t want to go the way he went. I would become a respectable person. I left the university, trained for my father’s profession, went abroad to get a better grasp of things, then went home and worked hard to become just like everyone else.

“As regards the Ulpius house, my sense of impermanence was not misplaced. Everything was destroyed. Nothing was left. Old Ulpius didn’t live long after. He was beaten to death while
making
his way home drunk from a bar on the outskirts of town. The house had earlier been bought by a rich fellow called Munk, a business friend of my father’s. I visited there once. It was awful. They’d fitted it out wonderfully, as if it were much older than it really was. There’s now a genuine Florentine well in the courtyard. The grandfather’s room became an Altdeutsch dining-room with oak panelling. And our rooms! My God, they turned them into some sort of old Hungarian guest house or God knows what, with painted chests, jugs and knick-knacks. Tamás’s room! Talk about impermanence … Holy God, it’s so late! Sorry, love, but I had to tell you all this at some time, no matter how stupid it might sound from the outside … Now, I’m off to bed.”

“Mihály … you promised to tell me how Tamás Ulpius died. And you haven’t told me why he died.”

“I haven’t told you how he died because I don’t know. And why he died? Hmmm. Perhaps he was bored to death. Life can be really boring, no?”

“No. But let’s get some sleep. It’s very late.”